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Delimiting anthropology: historical reflections on the boundaries of a boundless discipline.(Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry)

Delimiting anthropology: historical reflections on the boundaries of a boundless discipline.(Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry)

Anthropology provides an historical example of the difficulties of defining the boundaries of social science research. Around 1904, Franz Boas established its main divisions, and it underwent classical growth from about 1920 to 1960. Anthropology is a more flexible process in modern times, as there is a conflict of science versus humanities or postmodernism. New approaches do not fit traditional academic categories, but there is strong institutional inertia to emphasize the science aspect of social science research.

The boundaries of anthropology have always been problematic-more so, one suspects, than those of other social science disciplines or discourses. Never, however, so problematic as they are today. A recent issue of the Anthropology Newsletter suggests some dimensions and dynamics of the boundary problem. Since 1983, when the American Anthropological Association was reorganized to represent more effectively the numerous “adjectival anthropologies” that had emerged over the preceding quarter century, the number of constitutionally recognized units of the Association has more than doubled. There are now fifteen subsidiary “societies” (including the ethnological, humanistic, linguistic, medical, psychological, urban, visual, Latin American, and European, as well as those devoted to “consciousness” and “work”; ten “associations” (including Africanist, Black, feminist, political and legal, senior, and student, as well as several regional associations, and one devoted to “the practice of anthropology”; three “councils” (education, museum, nutrition); two “sections” biology and archeology); and one uncategorized grouping called simply “Culture and Agriculture.” Finally, there is a unit devoted to “general anthropology”—the rubric which at one time might have included all the rest, but whose now residual status is appropriately marked by its denomination as a “division.” Reflecting this subdisciplinary fragmentation, the circulation of the American Anthropologist, the Association’s official journal since its founding in 1902, has fallen from over 11,000 to less than 8,000, and is now taken by less than half of the individual members of the Association. Having worried such issues in a series of columns in the Newsletter, the Association’s Executive Director wondered if anthropology was now too fragmented to meet the future needs of what he still called “the discipline”: to educate “key audiences within and beyond the academy,” to attract “diverse voices to the discipline,” to foster “the use of anthropological knowledge in the public policy process”; “in short,” to “meet the challenges of today’s competitive, restructuring climate” (Cornman, 1995, p. 6). If the Executive Director’s call for reorganization focussed on “the discipline’s” internal boundaries and its relation to external audiences, an essay in the same number (under the recently instituted heading “Whither Our Subjects and Ourselves?”) instanced a heightened concern with the boundaries between anthropology’s practitioners and their traditional subject matter. Arguing that the very notion of such a boundary was “a holdover” from a colonialist era, the author quoted a previous essay in the same series to suggest that those once treated as “‘informants’ whose minds are to be mined by anthropologists” must now be seen as “co-producers of knowledge” (Mills, 1995, p. 7).

In contrast to these two fin-de-siecle boundary vignettes, consider the boundary definition offered at the beginning of the twentieth century by the man to whom the paternity of “the discipline” in this country is most frequently attributed. For Franz Boas in 1904, anthropology’s “domain of knowledge” included “the biological history of mankind in all its varieties; linguistics applied to people without written language; the ethnology of people without historic records, and prehistoric archeology” (Boas, 1904, p. 35). Boas’ grouping is immediately recognizable as the long traditional “four fields” of the American discipline—or, in the ironic phrase of some recent sceptics, its “sacred bundle.” Considered in the context of the two more recent vignettes (and several other passages from Boas), his remarks provide a vantage point for historical reflections on the variously problematic boundaries of anthropology.

Multifarious Origins and Contingent Unity: The Boundaries of Anthropology circa 1904 To begin with, it should be noted that in the same historical moment when “the discipline” had been recognized as a field of study in a small number of major American universities—usually in some joint department, or in conjunction with a museum—the leading figure in its academic institutionalization defined anthropology in historically contingent terms. Granting that its “historical development seems [my emphasis] to have singled out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science,” Boas insisted that the appearance of bounded disciplinarity was deceptive: the origins of anthropology were “multifarious,” and there were already “indications of its breaking up.” The “biological, linguistic, and ethnologic-archeological methods” were so distinct that soon “the same man” could not be “equally proficient in all of them.” The time was “not far distant” when biological and linguistic anthropology would split off, and “anthropology pure and simple” would deal with “the customs and beliefs of the less civilized people only” (Boas, 1904, p. 35). As Boas’ “multifarious” origins suggests, anthropology departs from several well-known models of disciplinary development: the Comtean hierarchical model, in which the impulse of positive knowledge is successively extended into more complex domains (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology); and the genealogical model, in which modern disciplines may be visualized as growing from various undifferentiated “ur”-discourses (the biological sciences out of natural history, the humanities out of philology, and the social sciences out of moral philosophy). In contrast, anthropology may best be visualized historically as originating by processes of fusion rather than fission. Boas himself spoke of its foundations as having been laid, by the mid-nineteenth century, from three points of view—“the historical, the classificatory, and the geographical” (Boas, 1904, p. 25). Looking back a century farther, it might be suggested that anthropology represents an imperfect fusion of four modes of inquiry differing in historical origin and epistemological assumption—including not only natural history, philology, and moral philosophy, but also antiquarianism. Depending on which ancestral line one chooses to follow forward, one may start from Buffon and Linnaeus, from Vico and Herder, from Ferguson and Montesquieu, or from Stukeley and Winckelmann. And although the lines forward are complex in both their differentiation and their intertwining, distinctive intellectual inheritances may be associated with the several lineages: out of the natural history tradition came both physical anthropology and the fieldwork tradition in sociocultural anthropology; out of the philological tradition came not only anthropological linguistics, but also symbolic and hermeneutic anthropology; out of the moral philosophical tradition came psychological and social anthropology; out of the antiquarian tradition came archeology and folklore.

From this perspective, anthropology has always had a somewhat different status than the other social scientific disciplines which, after a century of fission, came together in the 1920s to form the Social Science Research Council (S.S.R.C.). From the beginning of its modern (that is, institutionalized) history in the early nineteenth century, anthropology has been in a profound sense inter-disciplinary, both in origin and constitution. In the third quarter of the twentieth century, before the recent acceleration of fragmentation, anthropologists were inclined to congratulate themselves that they were able to appeal for research support not only to the S.S.R.C., but to the A.C.L.S. (American Council of Learned Societies) and the N.S.F. (National Science Foundation) as well. But as those acronyms suggest, the fusionary development sketched so far has a particular national character. In other countries, the disciplinary history of “anthropology” has been quite different. Despite the apparent inclusivity of its subject matter (anthropo-logia = the discourse, or in common parlance, the “science” of “man”), the actual content of “anthropology” has varied greatly in different times and places. In contrast to the modern Anglo-American tradition, “anthropology” came to have a different and narrower meaning in continental Europe, where the unmodified word referred to physical anthropology, either as one component of a federated field, or as claimant to disciplinary dominance. The former relationship is evident in nineteenth-century Germany, where the major anthropological organizations were called societies for “anthropology, ethnology, and prehistory”; a more contentious tradition is evident in France, where in 1859 two different societies were founded in Paris-the “anthropological” society insisting on the primacy of the physical diversity of humankind, and the other, the “ethnographic” society, insisting on the unity of humankind as a spiritual entity. Even in the Anglo-american sphere, it was only in the 1870s that “anthropology” became the encompassing disciplinary rubric—and then with differences of emphasis that were reflected in diverging and reconverging twentieth-century histories. On the European continent, the separate traditions long continued-although over the last several decades Anglo-american terminologies and organizational models have been increasingly influential in continental Europe (as they had previously been elsewhere in the world).

Like the French biological and the German federative traditions, the Anglo-american usage was the outcome of an earlier history, which is reflected etymologically in the distinction between “anthropology” and “ethnology”—the discourse, or science, of “nations.” The historical relation of “ethnology” and “anthropology” offers a third vantage point from which to consider the historical contingency of the discipline’s formation, and the boundary problems which are its heritage to this day. If the former term suggests an emphasis on the generic characteristics of the human species, the latter would seem on first glance to privilege the differences between groups of humankind; but as the fate of “anthropology” in the continental tradition suggests, the actual history of the two terms is more complex. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, the first continuously existent societies we would now call “anthropological” were in fact devoted to “ethnology” as “the science of races.” The paradigm question of their inquiry was the unity or diversity of mankind: whether, as “polygenists” argued, the differences between present human groups were sufficient to justify their consideration as separate species, or whether, as “monogenists” insisted, they were such as might have arisen over time in a single human line dispersed by migration over the globe. The groups privileged quite different classificatory criteria—two polygenists (precursors of the later physical anthropological tradition) emphasizing the presumably irreducible physical diversity of human races, monogenists, a linguistic differentiation which had arisen historically—with physical differences treated as the result of environmental modification over time. But insofar as a wide range of types of evidence was in principle relevant to the solution of the problem of human unity—especially for monogenists attempting to reconstruct the history of human migrational diversification—this reinforced the broadly embracive view of anthropological inquiry that was to become characteristic of the Anglo-american tradition in the later nineteenth century.

In the course of the Darwinian Revolution, “anthropology” replaced “ethnology” as the encompassing rubric within the Anglo-american anthropological tradition. In England this was marked by the formation of the Anthropological Institute under the leadership of members of the previously existing Ethnological Society in 1869; in the United States by John Wesley Powell’s definition, a decade later, of the government Bureau of Ethnology as a “body of scientific men engaged in the study of anthropology” (Powell, 1881, p. iii). In each case, the shift reflected the incorporation of humankind into an overall evolutionary process over a greatly lengthened time span. What was at issue was no longer simply the genesis or history of “races,” but the origin and history of the human species itself. Conceived thus in evolutionary terms, “anthropology” was no less embracive than “ethnology” had been, since an evolutionary explanation had in principle to account not only for the physical development of the human species, but also for the development of its distinctive mental capacities—including not only language, but all the mentalistic or social phenomena that E. B. Tylor included in his definition of “culture” or “civilization.” And although the time span of human emergence and differentiation had greatly expanded, the older “ethnological” problem—the reconstruction of the history of peoples—still had a place on the anthropological agenda, inasmuch as ethnic differentiation within the human species was in principle part of the larger evolutionary process. Whether conceived in evolutionary or ethnological terms, the evidences of race, of language, of culture, and of archeology were thus all relevant to the solution of major anthropological problems. It is in this historically constituted research context that Boas in 1904, abandoning the narrower usage of continental physical anthropology, could define the domain of anthropological knowledge in the inclusive terms of the “sacred bundle.” Although anthropology was for Boas an historically contingent phenomenon, it still had a substantial unity insofar as it addressed interrelated questions to which data from several of its sub-disciplines were relevant.

There is, however, another feature of Boas’ definition which bears on the historical constitution of the boundaries of “anthropology” as a “discipline.” Unconsciously anticipating the title of a much later and very influential book by Eric Wolf, it is clear that Boas thought that anthropology, as an historically (rather than logically) constituted domain, was about “the people without history” (Wolf, 1982). If in principle it dealt with all of humankind, in practice it focussed on human beings outside the mainstream of European history, whose precontact state and prior history had to be got at by other means than the normal evidence of professional historical inquiry. Although Boas did not pose the matter in these terms, one might suggest that as the various human sciences gradually differentiated themselves substantively and methodologically during the nineteenth century, the peoples who became the primary subject matter of anthropology dropped through the boundary spaces between the gradually separating disciplines. Simplifying the process, one might suggest that as careful analysis of documentary records became the hallmark of historical method, people whose only records were oral traditions (or “myths”) were excluded from history; insofar as the methods of comparative philology depended on the evidence of language change preserved in written documents, those whose languages had never been reduced to writing were excluded from linguistic study; as economics became systematically predicated on the analysis of monetary exchange, peoples outside the cash nexus lost their place in political economy. In the same period in which these people were being subjected to the colonial domination of European “civilized” countries, they were also being excluded from the human sciences, which for methodological as well as ideological reasons focussed more narrowly on the study of “civilized” humankind.

Thus it was that although in etymology and in underlying problem orientation “anthropology” was about all of humankind, it tended in practice to be limited primarily to peoples who, stigmatized as “primitive” or “savages,” were regarded as racially, mentally, and culturally inferior. From this perspective, then, Boas’ anthropology “pure and simple” was less an embracive “science of man” than the residuary disciplinary legatee of the dark-skinned savage (or, in Boas’ more generous terms, “less civilized”) peoples of the world. Methodological and conceptual leftovers from the emerging human scientific disciplines, politically dominated, and culturally despised, they were commonly thought in fact to be “vanishing.” In these terms, “anthropology” was not only historically constituted, but might even be historically delimited—and, therefore, in the minds of its proponents, all the more urgent. The question remained, however, by what methods, and in terms of what epistemological assumptions, it was appropriately to be conducted. A certain amount of folkloristic information might be collected near at hand from European peasant groups presumed to embody “survivals” of savage custom and belief; but insofar as the savage (or “primitive” subjects of anthropological inquiry resided beyond the geographical centers of Euro-American anthropological discourse and by virtue of illiteracy produced no written records of their own, the information upon which anthropological speculation was based was largely second hand. Although surviving accounts of the peoples at the margins of the classical Mediterranean world continued to be an important source down to 1900, from the time of Rousseau on the emphasis gradually shifted to the accounts of European “travellers and residents in uncivilized lands”—systematized, where possible, by questionnaires such as the Notes and Queries on Anthropology prepared by a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874. Each of these sources of information implied a problematic disciplinary boundary: between anthropology and folklore, between anthropology and classics, and most importantly, between anthropology and the literature of travel (including that of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators). By the time Boas wrote, the work of the Bureau of American Ethnology and of his own early students had laid the basis for the modern tradition of ethnographic fieldwork by full-time professional and academically-trained researchers. Significantly, however, Boas himself envisioned that project as the constitution, for preliterate peoples without historical records, of a textual and artifactual archive which, as nearly as possible, might be regarded as first-hand embodiments of the native mind—the equivalent of the source materials which were the foundation of Western humanistic scholarship.

For most of the nineteeth century, however, advocates of this multifariously constituted, variously denominated, nationally diverse, residually focussed and empirically second-hand discipline considered themselves, and sought be regarded, as practicing a “science.” And by the early 1880s “anthropology” had in fact won independent section status in both the American and the British Association[s] for the Advancement of Science. But inherent in the national diversity of its imperfectly fusing ur-discourses was a fundamental duality of epistemological assumption, upon which Boas himself had been one of the most perceptive commentators. Coming from Germany, where differentiation of the sciences of nature and the sciences of the human spirit had been more systematically argued, and trained in both physics and geography, Boas opened his anthropological career in the United States with a short essay analysing the latter inquiry in terms of this epistemological and methodological dualism embodied in the archetypes of “the physicist” and the “cosmographer” (in some passages spoken of as “the historian” . The physicist pursued a fragmenting analytic method that resolved phenomena into their elements; the cosmographer sought an integrative holistic understanding of each phenomenon, without regard “for the laws which it corroborates or which may be deduced from it” (Boas, 1887, p. 138) The physicist investigated phenomena that had an “objective unity” in the external world; the cosmographer studied phenomena whose connections “seem to be subjective, originating only in the mind of the observer” (Boas, 1887, p. 138)-phenomena, one might suggest, like “the genius of a people” or “the culture of the Kwakiutl.” Motivated by the “aesthetic” impulse, the physicist sought “to bring the confusion of forms and species into a system” (Boas, 1887, p. 139); motivated by the “affective” impulse, the cosmographer sought to penetrate into the secrets of the phenomenon itself, “until every feature is plain and clear” (Boas, 1887, p. 140). Boas did not propose a resolution of this duality, but granted the equal validity of both approaches to scientific inquiry. And just as each was expressed in different portions of his own anthropological work, so have they been variously expressed in the different subdisciplinary and national traditions that constitute the intellectual phenomenon we call today anthropology-not, however, only as tensions within, but also as boundaries between different subdisciplines, different national traditions, and different groups of practitioners with conflicting agendas of anthropological inquiry, as it entered its twentieth-century major phase.

From the Ethnographic Revolution to Anthropology Yesterday: Methodological Values and Shifting Boundaries in the “Classical” Period (c. 1920-c. 1960)

Although the various boundary tensions already evident both within and at the edges of anthropology in 1904 continued to be manifest, with varying degrees of salience, during the decades that followed, “anthropology” within the Anglo-american tradition managed, despite Boas’ prediction, to sustain a certain disciplinary unity. To a considerable extent, this may be explained in institutional terms: the existence of a national “anthropological” organization and journal, and the establishment of anthropology departments or faculties at major universities. Focussing in what follows primarily on developments in the United States and its dominant subdiscipline of cultural anthropology, the process may be seen primarily in terms of the role of Boas and his students. There was an episode immediately after World War I, in which Boas (who had publically attacked several unnamed archeologists active in Mexico for “prostituting science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies” [quoted in Stocking, 1968, p. 273]) was censured and removed from office by a close vote in the Association’s annual meeting. But despite this momentary setback, the movement toward Boasian dominance of the increasingly professional and academically oriented discipline quickly regained its momentum. By this time Boas’ students played a leading role in the half dozen major academic anthropology departments, and, despite variations of anthropological orientation (and their public and self-identification as “the American historical school” , thought of themselves as united in fighting for a “scientific viewpoint” in anthropology (Stocking, 1992, p. 117). While only one or two of them approximated the range of sub-disciplinary competences that Boas could legitimately claim, they continued to conceive “anthropology” as at some level a unified and bounded scientific enterprise, and to fight for its place among other disciplines and its influence in intellectual life and public discourse—characteristically, in critical (and even oppositional) terms, drawing on their experience of cultural alternatives to call into question disciplinary or popular cultural assumptions of a presumably universal but in fact ethnocentric character.

Within the “discipline” so bounded, however, the centrifugal tendencies evident in 1904 continued to operate, and over the next several decades were both augmented and counterbalanced by boundary-marking processes of a new and different character. Although varied in manifestation and impact, these may all be seen as concomitants or consequences of a general paradigmatic change: what has been referred to as “the revolution in anthropology” (Jarvie, 1964). Characterizing this change in very general and schematic terms, one might say that in both the United States and Britain (with similar manifestations also in other countries) there was developed, around different issues and at a varying pace, a general critique of the assumptions of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology. In the United States, this critique involved, in the work of Boas, a systematic reconsideration of the idea of “race” and of presumed “racial” differences of a hierarchical or evolutionary character. Physical differences were reinterpreted in terms of overlapping frequency distributions and environmental determinants; presumed mental differences were reinterpreted in terms of an emergent anthropological (that is, pluralistic and relativistic) concept of culture. Not all Boasians would have subscribed to such an extreme formulation as Kroeber’s insistence that “the determinations of biological, psychological, or natural science” had no force for the study of culture (Kroeber, 1915, p. 286). But the general effect of the Boasian critique of evolutionary racialism was not only to draw a much sharper boundary between race and culture, but simultaneously to reject biological determinism and to assert that of culture—a process which might be called the “debiologization” of anthropology. While there were in fact to be boundary-crossing investigations over the next few decades, that boundary continues—for ideological and political as well as theoretical and methodological reasons—to be defended until the present day, when the claims of “sociobiology” are regularly resisted by cultural anthropologists.

In Britain, the critique of evolutionism followed different lines at a different pace. The critique of race was delayed and derivative, and biological analogies continued to be manifest in the subsequently emergent functionalist anthropology. There, fifteen years after it began in the United States, the first phase of the anti-evolutionist reaction was a similar reassertion of the historical impulse in anthropology—the attempt, in the work of William Rivers and his followers, to reconstruct culture histories rather than evolutionary sequences (although in terms of migrating peoples rather than diffused cultural traits, and on a global rather than a regional scale). But in both countries, the longer run outcome of the critique of evolutionism was yet another major change in the boundaries of anthropology: a redefinition of its temporal orientation. Throughout the nineteeth century, anthropology had been a diachronic inquiry, focussed on the retrospective reconstruction either of developmental stages or of ethnic differentiation. Although the time spans were radically different, in both cases the goal was the reconstruction of change in time. But by the 1920s—after neo-diffusionary interludes in both countries—anthropology in the American and British traditions was well on its way to being redefined in synchronic terms.

This “dehistoricization” of sociocultural anthropology was linked to several other boundary marking aspects of the early twentieth-century revolution in anthropology: what, with apologies for further barbaric “izations,” might be called its “academicization” and “ethnographicization.” In the nineteenth century, ethnographic information, gathered largely from printed sources or by amateur observers on the colonial periphery, and often embodied in physical artifacts, was characteristically treated as raw material for theoretical speculations by scholars at home who came to be called “armchair” anthropologists. Insofar as these scholars might be regarded as “professionals” working in “anthropological” institutions, these were most likely to be general purpose museums with ethnographic departments. As anthropology became established in universities in the several decades after 1900, it shed its association with the museums. Rather than being carried on at second hand, ethnography became the activity of academically-trained fieldworkers—aspiring “professional” anthropologists whose research was theory-oriented, and who looked forward to careers in university departments. Parallelling this shift in institutional locus were shifts in the goals of ethnography. The collection of physical artifacts for museums ceased to be an important ethnographic function, to be replaced by the collection of texts and/or the observation of behavior. As the cultural phenomena sought by ethnographers became more ideational in character, the very notion of “material culture” began to seem somewhat oxymoronic. While initially the new academic fieldwork focussed on the reconstruction of a precontact cultural state on the basis of textual and “memory” ethnography, by the 1920s it was shifting to what later was called “participant observation” of behavior in the “ethnographic present”—a development parallelled theoretically by the turn toward “functionalism” (in Great Britain) and the study of cultural patterns and personality (in the United States).

The redefinition of the ethnographic enterprise may be symbolized by a change in the archetypal ethnographic object: the single “ethnos” or “tribe.” The archetypal “tribe” of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology might best be called the “Amongtha”—as in the characteristic Frazerian comparativist refrain, “Among the Arunta . . . , Among the Fuegians . . . .” But with the accomplishment of the ethnographic revolution, it was more appropriately called “My People”—the group among whom the fieldworker carried on “participant observation,” from whom were generated ethnographic “data” for subsequent interpretation, and who became the lifelong reference point for all his or her comparative anthropological statements.

Parallelling the shift from the Amongtha to My People, the ethnographic revolution is reflected also in what may be called the “methodological values” of anthropology—the taken-for-granted, pretheoretical notions of what it is to do anthropology and to be an anthropologist: the value placed on fieldwork as constitutive both of anthropological knowledge and of anthropologists; the value placed on a holistic approach to the entities that are the subject of anthropological knowledge; the value placed on a relativistic valuation of all such entities; and the value placed on their uniquely privileged role in the construction of anthropological theory. When an ethnographic anthropologist spoke of “my people,” he or she was in effect encapsulating these four “methodological values” in a single phrase. And insofar as ethnographic fieldwork became the distinguishing feature of the dominant sector of the “four-field” tradition, these values could be generalized to the discipline as a whole.

Recalling, however, the opposition Boas set up between the values of the cosmographer and the physicist, we may pose against these “My People” values a second set of “methodological values”: a value placed on the systematic comparative study of human variation; on general statements about the nature and causes of human diversity; on the “scientific” character of the venture; and on the potential integration in a single embracive discipline of a number of approaches toward these ends. Residues, in a sense, of the evolutionary phase of the discipline, these “Amongtha” values have remained very much alive in the twentieth-century anthropological discipline—differentially at various historical moments and in various sub-disciplines, but often simulataneously in the work of a single anthropologist—as in the case of Boas, who by training and disposition was as much physicist as cosmographer.

A closer examination of the history of modern anthropology, in the United States (and by extension, elsewhere) would reveal a complex interplay between these two methodological value sets, sometimes marking more sharply, sometimes blurring, sometimes redefining both the internal and the external boundaries of the discipline. During the interwar period, the divisive internal disciplinary tendencies Boas noted in 1904 continued to operate, as physical, archeological, and linguistic anthropologists established their own subdisciplinary organizations and publication outlets. Turning by 1930 increasingly to the social sciences, those who had once called themselves “ethnologists” began to refer to themselves as “cultural” (or in Britain, “social”) “anthropologists”—a development reflected in a second wave of academic institutionalization, which often initially took the form of combined departments of “sociology and anthropology.” This usually led, however, to the separate formation of more traditional “four-field” anthropology departments, in which, by mid-century, it was clear that a more “scientific” impulse had strongly reasserted itself.

The normative ethnographic focus of cultural anthropology continued to be the study of a single people by a single ethnographer in an empathic, holistic, and relativistic manner. While the group was usually non-European (though now rarely “primitive”-except perhaps with the modifier “so-called”), the possibility that ethnographic anthropology might be carried on in the more “complex” societies previously relegated to “sociologists” was explored in the 1930s by Lloyd Warner, and during World War II by Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and others in the study of “culture at a distance.” And in a variety of ways, anthropology in the postwar period may be said to have shifted towards a more “rigorous,” comparativist, universalist, and scientific orientation.

A vantage point for brief comment on these processes is provided by Anthropology Today, the papers from an international stock-taking symposium sponsored in 1952 by the Weriner-Gren Foundation and attended by eighty leading anthropologists (which, it was suggested, represented four percent of the number in the world). Although still reflecting the four-field and “historical” orientation of its elder statesman organizer, A. L. Kroeber, the resurgent “scientific” tendencies in cultural anthropology were very much in evidence: “multilinear” evolutionism (Kroeber, 1953, p. 318); social structure, in both the French and British modes; “universal categories of culture” (p. 507); psychological testing and “controls and experiments” (p. 452) (including replication) in fieldwork; the classification and comparative processing of ethnographic materials. Most strikingly, for a discipline whose primary social relevance in the Boasian tradition had long been limited to the critique of prevailing ethnocentric or racial assumption, there was now a notable (boundary redefining) interest in “problems of [the] application” (Kroeber, 1953, p. 741) of anthropological knowledge in industry and in government—domestic, international, and colonial.

Among the symposium participants, Robert Redfield echoed the past and foreshadowed the future in asserting the humanistic as against the social scientific relations of anthropology. But the positivistic impulse continued to be strong throughout the decade and into the next. In 1963, at a conference evaluating scholarship in the humanities, Eric Wolf was still proclaiming the “new American evolutionism” as evidence of “scientific maturity” (Wolf, 1963, p. 31) As a “lesson in cultural dominance on a scale never seen before” (Wolf, 1963, p. 13), World War II had led to a “repression of the romantic motif in anthropology” (p. 15) and a resurgence of the “Enlightenment themes” (p. 15) of predictability, standardization, and problem solving. Retreating from the “unlimited flexibility” (Wolf, 1963, p. 20) of human nature, anthropologists were now emphasizing cultural universals as against relativity; focussing on the “development of civilization” rather than the “cultures of primitives” (p. 22), they were studying acculturation, peasantries, and complex societies, with an interest in applied anthropology. Returning to “the ancestral problems” (Wolf, 1963, p. 59) of anthropology, they were now “for the first time in the history of anthropology” standing “on the threshold of a scientifically informed conception of the human career as a universal process,” seen from the vantage point of “a world culture, struggling to be born” (pp. 94-96).

By the time Wolf wrote, the internationalizing tendency already manifest in the Wenner-Gren symposium (and periodic postwar International Congresses of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences), reinforced by the establishment of the world-wide Wenner-Gren journal Current Anthropology, had in fact established the basis for what might be called a “world anthropology.” Sharing the methodological values associated with fieldwork by participant observation, it reflected a theoretical convergence of Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology (augmented by French structuralism), although within the context of a commitment to “general anthropology.” While manifesting ideological and conceptual residues of the evolutionary era, it was nevertheless characterized by commitment to the UNESCO values of humanist liberal anti-racism. But if that internationalizing impulse (somewhat decentered and pluralized by historical processes already operative in 1960) has continued to this day, Wolf’s vision was in many respects more apt as a comment on the anthropology of the postwar period than a foreshadowing of that of the later twentieth century.

From the Postcolonial to the Postmodern: The Exploding Boundaries of Anthropology at the End of the Millenium In the very period in which a “world anthropology” began to be realized, there were historical forces at work which, in the last third of the century, were to further problematize and redefine the historically shifting boundaries of anthropology. The end of colonialism (signalled by the independence of two dozen African “new nations” in the early 1960s); the overseas entanglements of the United States in the cold war against international communism (symbolized by the exposure of the Latin American counter-insurgency Project Camelot in 1965); the United States’ descent into the morass of postcolonial warfare in Southeast Asia (and the anti-Vietnam war movement); the counter-cultural and political resistance of young people in advanced capitalist countries (marked by the urban conflicts of the 1960s and early 1970s)--these and other “external” historical forces precipitated what seemed to some a “crisis of anthropology.” While that characterization would not have been accepted by most anthropologists at the time, it was clear by about 1970 that the optimistic scientific self-confidence of the “classical” period could no longer be sustained in the postcolonial world.

Although a sense of malaise, if not of crisis, was widespread in the human sciences, the traditional positioning of anthropology astraddle the boundaries between Europeans and non-Europeans (whether called “savages,” “primitives,” “preliterate,” or “Others”) made much less likely any attempt to carry on social scientific “business as usual.” The anthropological symptoms of malaise were manifest along a series of boundary-marking dimensions: substantive, ideological, methodological, epistemological, theoretical, demographic, institutional. In the face of rapid social change, and very different sorts of restrictions now placed on access to the sites of ethnographic fieldwork, it was no longer realistic, even normatively, to regard the recovery of uncontaminated non-European “otherness” as the privileged substantive focus of anthropological inquiry. Nor was it possible to regard such inquiry as ethically neutral, or innocent of political consequences. A new consciousness of the inherently problematic reflexivity of participant observation called into question both the methodological and epistemological assumptions of traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In the context of a general questioning of positivist assumption in the human sciences, there were signs of a shift away from synchronic homeostatic theoretical orientations. The very growth of the field was now a problem, as the substantial government funding of the 1950s and ‘60s began to be restricted, and newly certified doctorates began to overflow their accustomed academic niches, beyond which anthropology had yet to establish a strong claim to significant domestic social utility. After several decades riding a rising tide, confident that growing numbers of anthropologists would spread the tolerant critical humanism of the “anthropological spirit” throughout the world, the profession suddenly faced what some perceived as a general postcolonial “crisis of anthropology,” in which its long-run future seemed even to be in doubt.

In a context of anxious and sometimes angry discussion—the reverberations of which are felt to the present day—the early 1970s witnessed a call for the “reinvention of anthropology.” As expressed in the volume of that name, the specific proposals for change mirrored the sense of crisis along several different boundaries. Substantively, the call was for anthropology to “bring it all back home” (Hymes, 1972, p. 83)--a slogan from the popular political rhetoric of the 1960s. Deemphasizing the study of exotic “others” at the periphery, anthropology should focus more on disempowered social categories of the center. Augmenting the traditional orientation downward toward the powerless, it would also “study up” towards the groups that wielded power—in the hope that power could be radically restructured. Ideologically, it would move beyond the liberal posture of relativistic tolerance towards one of radical engagement in the struggles of the powerless against the holders of power. Methodologically and epistemologically, it would reject the positivistic assumption that cultures or cultural behavior could be observed as “objects” in the external world, and recognize the essential reflexivity of participant observation, and the inherently problematic character of the knowledge generated by the ethnographic process. Acknowledging the unavoidable involvement of all human beings in the processes of history, it would seek more dynamic theoretical models which allowed a role for human agency. Institutionally, it would no longer take for granted the configuration of subdisciplines that had been frozen into the structure of academic departments by the historical accidents of disciplinary development, and would turn its face outward from the ivory tower toward the problems of the contemporary historical world.

At the time, the volume Reinventing Anthropology received mixed reviews by anthropologists, the majority of whom might not have agreed that the discipline was in a state of crisis. However, if institutional and intellectual inertia have made the changes in anthropology a bit more glacial than convulsive, it seems clear in retrospect that many of the volume’s boundary-shaking tremors presaged developments that have continued to redefine the various boundaries of anthropology in the quarter century since: the impact of Marxist thought (which had been largely excluded from anthropology) and the concern with issues of power and domination; the study of resistance movements and the impact of world ecological crisis; the refocussing of anthropology on various minority groups (and other social and political issues) in contemporary Euro-American societies; the continued critical reflection on the ethnographic process and on the history of the discipline itself, with emphasis on their implication in the ideologies and practices of European domination. With the notable exception of feminist and gender issues which emerged after 1970 (redefining yet another boundary of the inquiry that, despite its presumptive universality, might hitherto have been called andro- rather than anthropo-logy), these topics suggest a more prescient perspective on the future of the discipline than Wolf’s overview eight years earlier. Reinforced by poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought—which have destabilized and relativized a broad range of previously bounded intellectual categories—and by a general blurring of intellectual genres and disciplinary boundaries, as well as by other intellectual trends and historical tendencies that are often encompassed by the rubric “postmodern,” the boundary redefining processes manifest in the period of “crisis” and “reinvention” have gained force down to the present day.

With the “methodological values” of the classical period in mind, one may contrast the situation facing apprentice ethnographers in 1930 and today. The “my people” values presumed the existence of bounded cultural entities—islands, literal or putative—into which the ethnographer might be incorporated, after a fashion, as “participant/observer” (or “stranger/friend”), and learn to know, in a sense, from inside. Back in 1930, preparing oneself for such a project did not seem so daunting; as one of Malinowski’s students later recalled, it was easy enough for an aspiring ethnographer to read “all there was” of “modern fieldwork” (quoted in Stocking, 1995, p. 367)--the writings of travellers, missionaries, and colonial administrators by implication dismissed as beyond the boundaries of serious academic anthropology. Although fieldwork then was not so unproblematically unreflexive as later critics sometimes assume, the main point, in those days of burgeoning professionalism and vanishing primitives, was “to get on with the work.” The understanding of those putatively bounded cultural or social entities was sought in relation to a limited set of theoretical issues; their representation, in terms of fairly standard textual models.

For the apprentice ethnographer in the 1990s, the boundary situation is in a number of crucial respects radically different. The range of relevant ethnographic material has increased tremendously, in part because the historicization of anthropology—the reemplacement of synchronic ethnographic entities into both local and world histories—has required the reincorporation of categories (travel, missionary and colonial administrative accounts) previously excluded as amateur. So also, the range of potentially relevant theoretical literature has broadened with the shifting and blurring of disciplinary boundaries—at the same time that traditional interpretive instrumentalities of grand theory and metanarrative have been called into question.

Augmenting this explosion of the boundaries of ethnographic discourse has been a blurring or erasure of the boundaries of its ethnographic objects: on the one hand, by the shifting of ethnographic focus from small scale to “complex” societies; on the other, by the reincorporation of the former into world historical processes. So also, the boundary between the observer and the observed began to be redefined. In the once-upon-a time of the colonial era, anthropologists and their informants could be seen as participants in a single moral/ epistemological community, dedicated to the preservation of traditional cultural forms in the face of encroaching European civilization. In the here-and-now of postcolonialism, the terms of access to the field were redefined, the process of inquiry began to be reconceptualized in “self-reflexive” and “dialogic” terms, and the ethics and politics of fieldwork became gnawing preoccupations. With the increasing awareness of the “globalization of the local,” the very idea of “the field” itself—the holy grounding of anthropological knowledge in the “classical” period—was itself called into question: “insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically self-conscious, or culturally homogeneous,” it has been argued that “the ethno in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology will have to respond” (Appadurai, 1991, p. 191).

Already in the mid-1980s, some anthropologists were proclaiming a “crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986, 7) in ethnographic anthropology, and the years since have witnessed a number of “experiments” in “writing culture” (Clifford and Marcus, 1986)--many of them exemplifying the “genre blurring” that had previously been noted as an aspect of the “refiguration of social thought” (Geertz, 1983, p. 19). With interpretation and narrativity replacing replication and comparison, the boundaries have continued to blur between ethnography and traditionally non-anthropological literary forms—cultural history, cultural criticism, investigative journalism. While no single representational paradigm analogous to “the kinship system of the X” has emerged from this “experimental moment,” there is a considerable replication of subtitles in the anthropology listings in publishers’ catalogues, many of which follow the pattern of “race, class, gender and ethnicity” in some past colonial or postcolonial situation—for postcolonial critics, though problematizing the familiar “master narratives” of hegemonic discourses, tend to share a “defamiliarizing” anti-master narrative of their own.

Not only have “the field” of ethnographic research and the modes of its representation come thus into question, but over a longer period, the ethnographer’s implicit standpoint of comparative leverage has also been destabilized. Despite varying degrees of incipient relativism, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists could assume that certain of the conceptual categories of their own “civilization” provided universal analytic reference points, But a century of warfare, holocaust, and impending ecological disaster have made it much harder to believe in the universalizing potential of the idea of “civilization.” In a parallel process of conceptual relativization, such presumably transcultural anthropological categories as kinship, economics, politics and religion have been dismissed as “undefined” and “vacuous” notions “embedded in European culture” (Schneider, 1984, pp. 181, 185)

Even the idea of “culture” itself has became problematic—not only conceptually, but ideologically and politically as well. Critics, both inside and outside of anthropology, have called “culture” into question as “essentializing”—the conceptual mirror image, as it were, of traditional racialist assumption; paradoxically, it has at the same time become the badge of identity of a multi-cultural multitude of minority groups—who may in fact deny the possibility that any outsider (anthropologists included) is capable of understanding or representing their cultural essence. These ideological/political issues may be seen also as the concomitants of conceptual indeterminacy: as it emerged in the Boasian period, the modern pluralistic anthropological concept of “culture” referred to that time-deep aspect of identity which was imposed upon rather than chosen by the individual. Today, in contrast, individuals (separately and as members of collectivities) may, in a variety of ways (selection, recreation, redefinition, reinvention, imagination) “choose” their cultures—with the consequence that the deep chronicity of cultures (as well as the “authenticity” of cultural practices) has in various ways been compromised (or, if one prefers, problematized). True, it might be countered that the boundaries of “a culture” were always problematic (and rarely if ever addressed by anthropologists as a matter of conceptual definition). In 1936, Radcliffe-Brown, a scientistic critic of Boasian culturalism, argued that there could never be a “science” of culture because (unlike society), it corresponded to no “real” entity in the world. Sixty years later, however, the problem is rather that culture is assumed to correspond to so many entities, at so many different levels of boundedness: Western culture, American culture, Gay culture, the culture of a street gang, or (moving back outward) the culture of a multinational corporation, and those of communities that exist only in cyberspace—not to mention the various transformations of the non-Western cultures that were the traditional subject matter of ethnographic anthropology.

Ethnographic anthropology continues to be practiced in the spirit of the “my people” values. In studying within “complex” societies, or pursuing the “globalization of the local,” ethnographers still seek island analogues—small groups of interrelated individuals among whom they can practice observation in a participatory mode: the first year class in a medical school, twenty middle-class families in Paris, a group of domestic workers in Milan who migrated from a town in Mindanao. But if such ethnographic specificity can still be defended as a defining feature of “the discipline,” there is no denying that the boundary-blurring developments of the postcolonial period have made much more problematic the status of the knowledge thereby produced, and its place in a larger anthropological enterprise (whether reinvented or merely evolved).

Institutional Inertia and the Persistence of Epistemological Dualism within an Embracive Tradition of Anthropology as the “Science” of [Hu]mankind Small wonder, then, that at the end of the millenium—after the category “science” itself has undergone more than three decades of relativizing critique—the problem of “Science in Anthropology” should recently have been chosen as the annual theme of the Anthropology Newsletter. The discussion was prefaced by a text attributed to the Association’s Articles of Incorporation, in which its “mission” was defined as the advancement of anthropology as “the science” that studies “humankind” [sic—in 1902?] in all its aspects, “through archeological, biological, ethnological and linguistic research”—followed immediately by the query “why has the issue of science in anthropology become so contentious?” (“Science in Anthropology,” 1995, p. 1). The immediate stimulus seems to have been the dissatisfaction, if not outrage, of self-professed “scientific” anthropologists with the editorial policies of the Association’s “flagship” journal-specifically, with an article published in 1994 that was perceived as a “postmodern” threat to the traditional “positivism” of archeology. Under the editorship of two “postmodernists” (so-labelled if not self-professed), the American Anthropologist has since completed a radical reformation, and by now sports a shiny red cover, larger pages, double columns, new type faces, striking illustrations, revised review formats, new departments, and deliberately blurred genres—including the publication of poetry (“in keeping with our pledge not to privilege any particular form of discourse as the sole means of legitimate anthropological communication” [Tedlock, 1995, p. 657). Responding to a resolution at the 1994 meeting (and to a “tremendous” volume of criticism on the internet), the Executive Board decided to seek “a common and higher ground” above the “science/postmodernism” (or “positivism /interpretivism”) conflict by recasting it in the less charged traditional terms of “science and humanism” in anthropology (Peacock, 1995, p. 1; Fernandez, 1995).

While the outcome of this discussion lies beyond the advancing bounds of history, it may be useful to reconsider some of the major boundary-defining forces of the past century—those marked above by the suffix “ization.” Despite the “debiologizing” tendency of the last century, what may be called the biological definition of humankind has been one of the enduring issues of anthropological inquiry. Given the recent resurgence, in disciplines at the margins of anthropology, of inquiry into the biological bases of human behavior, it seems not unlikely that the interface of the biological and the cultural, however problematic ideologically, may become once again a focus of systematic concern for anthropologists of differing subdisciplinary orientations. And. given the persistence of evolutionary concerns in some areas of anthropology, one cannot rule out the possibility of an eventual resurgence of evolutionism in anthropology analogous to that of the post-world War II period. In contrast, the “re-historicization” of anthropology has been well under way for several decades, and a glance at the tables of contents of anthropological journals is enough to suggest that it has momentum enough to carry into the next century. Whether as ethnohistory, or the historical anthropology of the colonial process, or the historical study of dominated or otherwise culturally distinctive groups within “complex” societies—or as the reanalysis of existing ethnographic archives, both textual and monographic—historical materials and historical analysis are major components of contemporary anthropological inquiry.

Even so, the prediction made by British historian William Maitland, on the eve of its “ethnographicization,” that “by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing” (quoted in Stocking, 1995, p. 369) seems unlikely to be realized in the near future. True, archival research has become increasingly a complement to (and even a substitute for) “fieldwork,” and the very notion of “the field” has been called into question. But if Boas’ short term prediction that “anthropology pure and simple” would soon deal with “the customs and beliefs of the less civilized people only” has over a longer run been falsified by the processes of world history, the study of the “global in the local” and the “local in the global” is still for the most part carried on by lone ethnographers in directly interactive relationship with small interactive groups of people. While sociologists, too, make ethnographic studies, and anthropological ethnographers sometimes employ more traditionally “sociological” methods (team research, sampling, questionnaires, quantitative analyses) in the study of contemporary social issues, extended ethnographic “fieldwork” carried on in terms of the “my people” values is still a distinguishing feature of anthropological inquiry. And despite the various blurrings of the boundaries of that inquiry—including the dialogization of the fieldwork process and the narrativization of its product, as well as the appropriation (and questioning) of its core concepts by disciplinary outsiders—the academic specialization of anthropology remains in institutional terms strongly defined.

It is true that the “academicization” of anthropology has in some respects undergone a sharp reversal: whereas in the early 1970s 87 percent of doctorates in anthropology took jobs in academic settings, “the overall applied figure” (Givens and Jablonski, 1995, p. 311) in the 1994-95 cohort was close to 50 percent. But if the sex of anthropologists has changed dramatically (the proportion of women doctorates rising from 32 percent to 59 percent since 1972), and the dominance of Euro-Americans has been slightly reduced (from 96 percent to 84 percent), to be acknowledged as an “anthropologist” still implies the achievement of a doctorate in an academic anthropology department. Some anthropologists may write like novelists or journalists, and practice poetry on the side, but novelists and journalists—lacking the doctorate—do not qualify as anthropologists. A hundred years after Boas’ prediction that biological and linguistic anthropology would split off, “anthropology,” as a rubric of professional identification, continues nominally to embrace the subdisciplinary components of the traditional “sacred bundle”—and in “relatively stable” (Givens and Jablonski 1995, p. 306) proportions, as indicated by the percentages of doctorates over the last twenty years: 50 percent sociocultural; 30 percent archeological; 10 percent biological; 3 percent linguistic; and 7 percent “applied/other.” True, at the graduate level the once traditional requirement of significant training in each of the “four fields” has at best a vestigial character, if it has not entirely withered away. Furthermore, communication across the major subdisciplinary lines within departments is often limited and occasionally agonistically competitive. In only one or two cases, however, has this so far led to a formal institutional separation. Of about 400 academic departments listed in the Association’s Guide, 240 are separate “departments of anthropology.” While another 124 departments at smaller institutions are in some combination with sociology, the tendency of such joint entities over the last half century has been towards the separate formation of embracive anthropology departments. If the continuation of this dynamic in an era of academic downsizing is problematic, the pressure of enrollments, in number-crunching universities where “anthropology” often satisfies the “science” requirement, may help to sustain it. Whatever its boundaries, external or internal, anthropology” remains an attractive academic field: over the last seven years, the number of baccalaureate degrees has almost doubled. How long such forces of institutional inertia within the academy will continue to sustain the embracive tradition of anthropology as a nominally distinct and unified “science of [hu]mankind” against the fragmenting and boundary blurring intellectual and historical processes of the twentieth century is to say the least problematic. They are reinforced, however, by a strong commitment to “science” as a value in various sectors of the discipline, and at a potent rhetorical level, within anthropology generally. Despite inroads of interpretation and narrativity into archeology and biological anthropology, these two subfields remain strongly committed to “science.” Similarly, “science” is still proclaimed as a value by many in the traditionally more “humanistic” moiety—albeit sometimes with a relativising redefinition that gives little reassurance to the positivistically inclined, or simply in terms of the long tradition of presumptive complementarity.

At the national professional level, the forces of institutional and value inertia are even more strongly manifest—and reinforced by a pragmatic survivalist concern. In the face of funding cuts by decision makers who ask “where is the science in the social sciences?” (Cornman, 1995, p. 1), the American Anthropological Association, despite its internal fragmentation, is strongly impelled to re-present itself in unified and scientific terms, as devoted to the “dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems” (“Science in Anthropology,” 1995, p. 1). Measured in terms of attendance, and the number of papers offered, the meetings of the Association are as lively as ever. While some may experience them as anomic circuses of post-paradigmatic confusion, for others they are evidence of the boundless energy of an unbounded discipline—unlikely to be historically delimited, at least in the near future. (*) This essay is a revision and elaboration of the 1990 Snyder Visiting Lecture at the University of Toronto, entitled “The Science(?)s(?) of Man(?): Historical Reflections on the ‘Sacred Bundle’ of Anthropology.” In reworking it, I have drawn on a lecture given to the Fourth Spanish Congress of Anthropology in April 1987 (“Anthropology Yesterday and Today: Thoughts on the ‘Crisis’ and ‘Reinvention’ of Anthropology” , as well as on several previously published essays cited in the list of “References.” It is informed also by discussion in a Graduate Seminar, “Exploring the Boundaries of Antropological Discourse,” given in the Winter of 1995.

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